Tracking violent incidents in Barbados is central to everything I do here on the blog and in the homicide database. It all starts with checking the news periodically throughout the day and into the night. Once I find something related to violent crime, it becomes an incident. This also means that my numbers may understate the actual number of incidents, since not every violent event makes the news.
An incident, for the purposes of my work (viewed from a purely data-analyst lens rather than that of a sociologist, criminologist, etc.), is a violent event that is either fatal (i.e. resulting in or contributing to death) or non-fatal (no death, but possibly injury to the body or damage to property).
My blog runs on WordPress (the homicide database is a separate website built with HTML, PHP, JavaScript, and MySQL, if you’re curious). WordPress uses categories and tags to organize content. Every post on the blog is assigned to at least one category — the “incident” category — followed by others such as month, day, shooting, stabbing, robbery, and so on. I also use tags in each post. Categories are broad-based — for example, “Shooting”. Tags provide more detail, such as the name of a victim or a street address.
In the chart above, I’ve taken a high-level look at the number of fatal and non-fatal incidents recorded between January and May 2025. (Details on these incidents can be found using the category cloud on the blog or by browsing the homicide database.)
Please note that these numbers are not official and are based exclusively (or largely) on reports from mainstream media. Still, they offer a useful snapshot of the violence landscape in Barbados so far this year. For more detail, explore the category tags on this site (bottom of the screen if you are on a mobile, right of your screen if you are on a laptop/desktop/tablet), or visit the homicide database.